The
Perfect Medium covers a fascinating
movement in photography that will be
familiar to many visitors to the
American Museum of Photography:
our online exhibition "Do
You Believe?"
has been exploring spirit photographs
and the associated issues of faith and
fraud since 1999.

Based
on a wildly popular exhibition shown at
the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New
York and at the Maison Europeenne de la
Photographie in Paris, The Perfect
Medium includes images from the
1860s to the 1960s. In addition to
photographs depicting spirit mediums,
seances, ghosts and ectoplasm, this
book includes photographs of "fluids"
and auras that tread the line between
scientific experimentation and abstract
art. There are camera-less
thought-o-graphs that appear to show
glowing shapes and other-worldly faces
in a swarm of bubbles. Levitations are
recorded, too -- both in the form of
leaping mediums caught in mid-air, and
objects like folding snack tables that
are supposedly defying gravity.

288
Pages

9
x 11.5 inches

More
than 250 color
illustrations

The
book is divided into three sections:
"Photographs of Spirits," "Photographs of
Fluids," and "Photographs of Mediums." Each
section is accompanied by essays and portfolios
of images. The section on "Fluids" covers a
range of odd ideas, from Kirlian photography to
"thoughtography" to the concept of a universal
life-fluid or "ether" that invisibly snakes
through everything in existence. The essay by
Clement Cheroux catalogues all of these
invisible rays and mysterious emanations and
explains how they fit into scientific thought a
century ago. Cheroux's comments are especially
helpful in helping the reader understand the
weird blobs and glows seen in the photographs
accompanying this section, which are often
reminiscent of abstract art.

In
the studies of mediums, Pierre Apraxine's essay
on "The 'Margery' Case" recounts the
cat-and-mouse game played by magician Harry
Houdini and a clever Boston socialite/spirit
medium known to the public as "Margery." Other
writings cover familiar ground: the spirit
photographers William Mumler and Frederick
Hudson, and the adamant insistence of Sir Arthur
Conan Doyle that photographs of both ghosts and
fairies were genuine.

After
an exhibition completes its tour, the
photographs come down from the walls and are
returned to the institutions and private
collectors that loaned them. Even the best
exhibitions leave little more than impressions
and emotional memories for those who have seen
them in person. But when an exhibit is
accompanied by a fine illustrated work like
The Perfect Medium, it can live on for
many years and reach wider and wider
audiences... to educate, amuse, and share the
experience of seeing these rare and often
beautiful works of faith and fraud, hope and
deception, belief and intrigue.